After the First Death

Gwyneth:

After they left, I stood in the reception room for a long time. Just stood there. The silence that settled over the room after I gave the order seemed inescapable, as if even my breath might disrupt the quiet, the heaviness, of that moment.

He attacked Drysi. A goblin attacked my daughter. Galyanna and her Talon, Dakkon, brought the half-dead creature to me, to ask me for justice, to ask for a decision on whether he should live or die.

I asked Galyanna to tell me the circumstances under which she’d found the creature.

It seemed he had happened upon Drysi and Mikachu and had done considerable damage to poor Mika before Galyanna had arrived, attacking Drysi also in the process.

They’d tried to get some information out of him, but he knew little and when they brought him to me, he was half dead. I called for Wulfrich.

Dyisi was there, probably canoodling with Kern before this business began, but she swiftly came into the reception room to act as witness.

I heard the story. I thought, only for a second, and I looked to Wulfrich for advice. He saw my unspoken question (he always does), and he nodded.

I told them to kill him, but not to spill his blood in Faerie. I could have declared war on all the Goblin Kingdom for this breach, but I didn’t.

I ordered the taking of a life.

I can’t stop saying it, thinking it, going over it in my head. There was no other way. Had we returned him to his people, his life would have been worth only what information he could give them, and who knows what he’d know or remember in his distressed state. Better, I rationalised, that Dakkon kill him now than he be subjected to the tortures of his kith back in the Goblin holds.

I ordered the taking of a life. A life.

I ordered the taking of a life. A life. A being once living is now dead because of my words, my order, my power.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

—Dylan Thomas

Style Card:
Body: Maitreya
Hair: EMO-tions, Genesis (new at the EMO-tions Main Store)
Skin: Pink Fuel, Sora Alabaster
Dress: Faida + Fallen Gods, Nuit Reveur Azure, Nuit Reveur Silver
Necklace: Empyrean Forge
Bracelets: Wimey
Ring: JCNY
Treehouse: LAQ
Couch: Libertine, Justine